Elizabeth Grice

One small change: Marlene Dietrich removed just one word from a piece Kretzmer wrote about her. Photo: Anton Bruehl

Grey muzzle, low growl, noble profile. Herbert Kretzmer looks and sounds like an old lion these days. He is probably the biggest of the big beasts that roamed Fleet Street in the '60s and '70s, seeking to capture celebrities of the day in deceptively silky paws and offer them up to a glamour-hungry readership.

Marlene Dietrich, Truman Capote, Peter Sellers, Groucho Marx, Irving Berlin ... Kretzmer's kind of quarry makes "celebrity" too puny a word. Although he was ruthless in pursuit of the legends of stage and screen, tracking writers, prizefighters and entrepreneurs as well as film stars and actors, he was far too well-mannered to be an outright predator. Some of them became his friends.

"Why don't you come out and see me more often?" demanded Sellers from a poolside in Los Angeles. The comedian's self-absorption was, by this time, trying the patience of his friends.

"Because I don't want to be a member of your entourage," replied Kretzmer, one of the few people who had known him before he was famous. Sellers clenched his fist and hit the wall in a fit of blind violence.

"We got over it," Kretzmer says. "There was finally something adorable about the boy. He would have you absolutely helpless, bent over with laughter. You can forgive people everything, everything, if they are able to do that. Fame overwhelmed him like a tidal wave and he drowned ... he drowned, poor man."

Kretzmer had luck, charm and nerve. Hanging about with Dietrich's devotees after a performance in Birmingham ("more a congregation than a crowd"), he somehow managed to insinuate himself beside the enigmatic actress in the back seat of her limousine. He escorted her to her hotel room, extracting the promise of an interview the following morning. A condition was that she should be able to "peruse" his copy before publication. She deleted one adjective – "freckled", as a description of her ageing finger – and thanked him in a sprawling handwritten note, which he has kept.

Advertisement

Perhaps not many of his famous interviewees – captured in his new book, Snapshots – knew that the courteous, well-dressed man from the Daily Express was already a successful lyricist who had written chart-toppers for the French singer Charles Aznavour and the hit single Goodness Gracious Me for Sellers and Sophia Loren. Or that Millicent Martin sang his songs on the satirical television show That Was the Week That Was. They certainly could not have guessed that he would become as celebrated as any of them – by writing the English lyrics for the unstoppable stage behemoth Les Miserables.

The collection of Kretzmer's encounters with 20th-century legends shows what a proud and revelatory craft showbusiness journalism once was. He operated in the days when a writer could pick up a phone and get through to a millionaire or a film star without layers of publicists and intermediaries. The famous seemed trusting and recklessly available to him with their insecurities and confidences.

Philosophical: Yul Brunner was ''owner of the most celebrated skull in the world''. Photo: New York Times

Over breakfast with Yul Brynner ("owner of the most celebrated skull in the world") in his London hotel suite, Kretzmer discovered a shy philosopher. When he interviewed a homesick singer and actress Petula Clark in her Paris home at midnight, she took him into the darkened nursery to stand at the cot of her sleeping child. Walt Disney, creator of the most famous rodent in the world, confided: "Mice frighten me ... you never know where they are going."

A 40-ish Shirley MacLaine, in a mud-brown sweater, everyday slacks and no make-up, was scathing about airheads. "You can't be a good professional and just be a sort of showbusiness turnip ... I don't think there's such a thing as a great performer who has nothing to say."

Confidante: Herbert Kretzmer talked to many Hollywood stars in the days where PR wasn't a stumbling block. Photo: Daily Telegraph

Singer Anthony Newley, who was married to Joan Collins, confessed: "Everything in my body revolts against what I do for a living." He said of his glamorous wife: "Joanie regards life as a kind of mardi gras to which she has been invited and from which she intends to be the last to go home."

Kretzmer, 89 next month, is reclining in a zebra-patterned chair in a South Kensington residence at least as grand and gracious as those of the stars he visited. Throughout the house, in posters and on director's chairs, is evidence of his own celebrity, of what happened when he gave up his day job – by then, television critic of the Daily Mail – shut himself away for five months and emerged with the English libretto for the French musical Les Miserables.

"I don't translate, I recreate," he explains. "You cannot translate a song. Simply to translate the words into their dictionary meaning isn't going to work. It doesn't interest me." A third of the show, he points out, had no previous existence in any other language.

Kretzmer caught the fame bug early and irrevocably. As a boy growing up in the one-horse town of Kroonstad in the central flatlands of South Africa, he was exposed to the glamour of Hollywood through strictly rationed Saturday afternoon visits to the local cinema. Star-struck, impatient, he wanted to know more about his screen heroes. What were they really like?

"I never wanted to be famous myself. I never saw myself as a star or a hero, but I wanted to be near the golden people, to become a part of their world."

From his earliest career in Johannesburg and then London, there were always two strings to his bow – newspaperman and lyricist. He sees the professions as compatible. "In rhyming and journalism, you work under constant stricture. You are held loosely behind bars. There is something about being constrained that appeals to me: the freedom inside the cage."

If he were still in the game, he doubts whether there are many celebrities he would like to interview. "Now it is an organised affair," he says. "I always resolutely refused to have anybody else in the room. I doubt whether you'd get away with that now."

The beginning of the end of his career in newspapers happened in 1984 when Kretzmer tried to persuade Cameron Mackintosh to back a sharper, angrier version of a 1964 musical he had written, Our Man Crichton. Mackintosh declined. But as Kretzmer was crossing the great expanse of carpet to leave, he inquired: "Why didn't you go on writing lyrics?"

Kretzmer listed his songs, including She and Yesterday When I was Young. They were among Mackintosh's favourites. "Six months later, when he was stuck for a lyricist for Les Miserables, Mackintosh remembered that snatch of conversation between the sofa to the door. In those 15 yards, my life totally changed."

Kretzmer was 61 when Les Mis became a word-of-mouth hit. He continued with his newspaper job for a year, not daring to believe the evidence of his bank account. "All I knew was that I had one show in one town in one theatre. I had no idea that a miracle had befallen me."

Les Miserables has made him an immensely wealthy man, but not a satisfied one. "I am waiting for the great comfort that wise men say comes with age," he says. "It is taking a long time getting here. My anxieties remain in place."

What can he possibly be anxious about? "Perceptions."

But surely his reputation is secure? "No, no. Never enough."

The Telegraph, London

Snapshots: Encounters with Twentieth-Century Legends is published by The Robson Press. Les Miserables opens at the Capitol Theatre in March, 2015.